HTC One M9 Review: Lollipop, Octa-Core Snapdragon, Boomsound Impress

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Performance: Browsing and JavaScript

Next, we'll take a look at how the HTC One M9 compares to other smartphones by examining a few benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace.

First, let’s take a look at the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:

This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

StatisticallySound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to determine if the difference is statistically significant.

JavaScript testing

JavaScript Android and iPhone testing

In the past, we’ve noticed that the Chrome browser is typically slower than other browsers in this test, but it proved only a few milliseconds slower than the vanilla "Internet" browser app used in the score above. We ran this test a few times to ensure that nothing was awry, but sure enough, it paced quite a bit slower than other Android flagships that has shipped within the past year. As we stated earlier, though, real-world browsing felt crisp and quick.

The One M9 performed better in Rightware's BrowserMark test, topping most every other Android flagship save for the latest Galaxy phones and Apple's iPhone 6.